In order to empower Indian women, Facebook has launched its new piloting tools. These new tools will give them more control over who can download and share their profile picture featuring them. After launching in India first, the social platform hopes to expand the new feature to other countries too. People in India would now see a step-by-step guide to adding an optional profile picture guard.
Aarti Soman, Product Manager at Facebook said, “In our research with people and safety organizations in India, we have heard that some women choose not to share profile pictures that include their faces anywhere on the internet because they are concerned about what may happen to their photos”.
Soman also clarified that other people will no longer be able to download or share the profile picture. Also, people who are not friends on Facebook won’t be able to tag anyone including themselves in their profile picture. She also added that Facebook will prevent screenshot of pictures. These features are only available on Android devices. The social platform will display a blue border and shield around profile picture as a visual cue of protection deterring misuse.
To give more control to people and help keep them safe online, these tools are developed in partnership with Indian safety organizations like Centre for Social Research, Learning Links Foundation, Breakthrough and Youth Ki Awaaz. They also partnered with Jessica Singh, who is an illustrator and takes inspiration from traditional Indian textile designs such as bandhni and kantha, to create designs for people to add to their profile picture.
Besides Facebook is exploring new ways so that people could more easily add designs to profile pictures which in return will be helpful in deterring misuse. If someone finds that a picture marked with these designs is being misused in that case, they can report it to Facebook and they will take the decision to leave or remove from the social platform.